User talk:Thurstan/Archive3
Haeremai, welcome, talofa, Willkommen, bienvenue, welkom Welcome to the Genealogy wiki! We volunteers hope you can make continuing contributions of articles and/or discussion and other improvements. If you are new to Wikia or wikis in general, a visit to may be a very good idea. That page should be of some value to any intending contributors, even those experienced with wikis. Please also check out the "Community portal" for an outline of some of the main parts of the site, links to pages that tell you how to edit, and the link to a guided tour of some of the better pages. A good place to start each visit is the ' ', where all edits and their authors (anonymous or signed-in) are listed. Bookmark it, maybe. (And help delete spam - unpleasant but a fact of life.) There's an email list system for messages to all subscribers: : see Genealogy:Mailing list. "Traffic" is not high, so you will not risk flooding your inbox by joining. Please consider adding a "Babel" template (if you have not already done so) to your "User" page so that others know which languages you are comfortable reading. The site is basically in English but there's no prohibition on other languages. We already have over 100 kB in Spanish, for example. If you live in New Zealand, you're invited to add your name to Category:New Zealanders contributing to this site by adding that to your User page (in double square brackets). And if your fortune lies elsewhere, you may create a corresponding category for your country unless there is one already. See Category:Contributors. Discuss any aspect of the site, or ask questions, at the Forum or on the "Talk" page associated with each article. Sign and date your contributions there, so that readers know "who to talk to" and whether your message is probably still of current interest. If you write on a user's "talk" page, that user will get an alerting message on next visit. It would help some of us to know how you discovered this site. Enjoy! Robin Patterson 22:59, 1 January 2008 (UTC) Migrants/immigrants/emigrants Please read Forum:Migrants/immigrants/emigrants - including those who stopped over on the way - and maybe add your opinions - before creating new categories of migrants. Note that a bot can probably give them parent categories, as discussed there. That said, I must say I'm pleased to see someone else taking a serious interest in creating meaningful categories. Robin Patterson 12:18, 26 January 2008 (UTC) Thank you for the reply on my talk page. I'll look at the one you mentioned and I'll look at Category:Ancestry from England to see what misled you. Robin Patterson 04:02, 27 January 2008 (UTC) More categories for Oz I like them - http://genealogy.wikia.com/index.php?title=Category:Australia&diff=next&oldid=22814 - Robin Patterson 13:11, 6 March 2008 (UTC) Still more cats - http://genealogy.wikia.com/index.php?title=Category:Died_in_Tasmania&action=history - and not only for Oz, if your recent Ireland and England categories are any indication. Most categories that have two or more significant words in their names can have at least two parent categories, each taking one of those words up one level. (:-D Robin Patterson 09:30, 8 March 2008 (UTC) :I'm not sure what should be the parents of "Died in Australia": obviously one is "Australia". Is the other "Deaths" or "Deaths by Country" or "People by Country" or "Categories by Country" or what...? Should births, deaths and marriages by under some sort of "Events" category? :Thurstan 11:07, 9 March 2008 (UTC) ::I spent several hours not being sure too. Then I did some category tree climbing. It's "People by death place". See Category:People by marriage place. Goodnight! Robin Patterson 13:12, 9 March 2008 (UTC) ::Postscript: another (not exclusive) option is Category:Died in Oceania. Robin Patterson 13:10, 18 July 2008 (UTC) Levels of categorisation - and exceptions I like your addition of the direct link to Scotland - http://genealogy.wikia.com/index.php?title=Category:Counties_of_Scotland&diff=154486&oldid=119325 Wikipedia's category levels are generally very sensible and logical, but occasionally a leapfrog addition like that is in line with common sense genealogy. And I approve of your changes resulting in "Members of the" Cth. I think it's the WP cat anyway. Robin Patterson 10:41, 9 March 2008 (UTC) Malcolm Grieve Hi. I am Malcolm Grieve's G Grand daughter, & I was wondering how you came about the information.Kerrywhite 03:16, 2 April 2008 (UTC) You are refering to Malcolm Grieve (1863-1938), I assume. My major sources are listed under "References". I am not descended from the Grieve family, but the Levingston family (my family) are intertwined with the Bath, Gillies and Hoy families, which all have connection with your family. I encourage you to contribute to the wiki (though I must revise these pages!). Thurstan 03:48, 2 April 2008 (UTC) Further to the above: most of the descendants seem to have come from two databses (2630182 and 2630189) which have been removed from http://awt.ancestry.com. Are you connected to William White (c1836-1899)? Thurstan 04:54, 2 April 2008 (UTC) Template talk:Showinfo children Hello, I just increased the child limit to 22 as you requested. If you need to go beyond that, just ask. -AMK152(Talk • ) 20:51, 28 May 2008 (UTC) Info pages Please read my recent addition to Forum:Creation of /info pages for all person articles. Robin Patterson 14:36, 6 July 2008 (UTC) Template for Oz county pages etc Your use of Template:Navbox Ausdiv, without comment on a forum or talk page, must mean you think it's OK. It's not designed for states; but I can see no obvious reason why it shouldn't be used for them, at least until we have a fair coverage of lower divisions. The resulting subpages will be fairly general and may get rather full. Since studying the UK and US equivalents and reading some earlier pages, I've been wondering whether the creation of subpages is a good idea. As the "People" row produces categories, I can't think of a reason why the other rows should have to produce subpages. Ordinary pages with the standard sort of word order might be just as easy to create and less off-putting to users, as well as being slightly easier to categorise manually. I'll repeat that concern in Forum:County subpages - categorising and study the template code again. And I should be heading for bed. Robin Patterson 13:35, 18 July 2008 (UTC) Subpages Not much response to the above concern even when copied to the better-publicised forum page. Now done some "links" subpages. Here's the biggest: New South Wales/links. It needs a category or two, and I wonder whether an ordinary article-type name for it would be better than making it a subpage. Does looking at it give you any more inspiration? Robin Patterson 05:15, 22 August 2008 (UTC) New bot: AMK152Bot *Please see this discussion, in regards to flagging it. -AMK152(talk • ) 03:31, 22 July 2008 (UTC) Wollombi, New South Wales Some more can be dug out of Wikipedia about that town (with 38 hits for the bare word, though some of those are the Wollombi Brook), but I suspect you need to use Google - "Results 1-10 of about 220,000 for Wollombi (0.38 seconds)"! - to make it substantial. Then we can copy it to Wikipedia and show that it comes from here. I forget whether there's a template for that. We may have to make our own modelled on one in Wikipedia:Category:Wikia templates. Occasionally I succumb to the temptation to expand some unfinished work by relative newcomers. I'm glad it's sometimes welcome, as this time. Robin Patterson 15:21, 23 July 2008 (UTC) Surname cats for similar person name pages See Talk:Robert Levingston. Robin Patterson 06:19, 25 July 2008 (UTC) Now another subtlety: see hndis again and prepare to copy that block in its slightly amended form for your next disambiguations. Robin Patterson 09:23, 25 July 2008 (UTC) :You shouldn't really need the DEFAULTSORT: surely Robert Levingston will sort on its name (so on "Robert", as required). (I just checked). Or have I missed something here.... :Thurstan 12:20, 25 July 2008 (UTC) ::What you may have missed is my point (where I bolded the initials to make it more obvious) that an unsorted Mary Brown lists after Mary A. Brown and potentially hundreds of others, even as far down as Mary Brophy Brown, whereas I think we want the disambig page to list first in its group. Robin Patterson 15:50, 25 July 2008 (UTC) :::Gotcha, sorry to be so slow. :::Thurstan 22:05, 25 July 2008 (UTC) Problems with hndis and info pages You're right. See Margaret Wood, which I have just created to confirm your hypothetical example. AMK is probably the current expert on info pages and how their surnames get into hndis. I know nothing!! Start with Forum:Help desk to make it more likely that all the experts will see the problem. Robin Patterson 06:44, 26 July 2008 (UTC) Ha! Confuciuspedia say "Be bold", so Thurstan is bold. Fixes the problems himself. Gets credit for it on the hndis page. Ozzie ozzie ozzie... Robin Patterson 12:52, 27 July 2008 (UTC) :Sorry, I should have shot you a note, since you've missed a wrinkle there: I actually coded the equivalent to ".*Mary_.*Brown_\(.*info", to only match surnames. :Thurstan 21:54, 27 July 2008 (UTC) ::I don't see what wrinkle I may have missed. See the long paragraph in my last addition to hndis (below the one that credited you for the underscores). I didn't specifically credit you with the "\(", but anyone reading the Levingston page history will see your input. Now did I really miss anything? (If not, there's no need to apologise; unlike me, you can't devote 24 hours a day to this wiki, so at my best I'm likely to miss less than you part-timers do!!) Robin Patterson 03:01, 28 July 2008 (UTC) :::No, seems to be me missing things: I read your second-last paragraph, I don't recall even seeing your last paragraph! I do tend to leap in without thinking (as you will have noticed!). :::Thurstan 03:36, 28 July 2008 (UTC) Category:Married in 1801 and thousands like it How long did you take to create Category:Married in 1801 and the other two around the same time? Looks like a perfect job, so it must have taken many seconds. Intervals were 39 seconds and 35 seconds. Only 20 bytes but you had to insert some digits. From a look at its decade, I guess there must be several hundred still to create just for the last millennium and the best part of a thousand for the previous one. I'd support a request for a bot to do that. Robin Patterson 11:36, 26 July 2008 (UTC) healey Hi Thurston, i have just stumbled upon your page. My gradfather is Albert Hugh Healey and we share Robert Levingston and Mary Jane Case as great great grandparents. I will try to learn how to add our side from Albert Hugh. patrick healey :G'day, great to have you on board. NDCB is another relative of ours (though not a vary active user here). I don't have any details on the descendants of Albert Hugh Healey. If I can assist you, don't hesitate to ask. Thurstan 04:49, 7 August 2008 (UTC) Regions of New South Wales Good work filling them with localities. Now there are two earlier-created regions that don't match the ODP grouping: *Category:New England, New South Wales *Category:Southern Highlands, New South Wales You know where they are, so I won't try to work it out unless you ask. I think they match WP's, but in this area that's not gospel, as I've mentioned before (with memories of distinct inconsistencies around the Sthn Hghlds). Can you fit them into our "agreed" regions? Robin Patterson 11:03, 21 August 2008 (UTC) I'm sorry this is a bit late but could be better late than never. Please check out the NSW GenWeb forum regions and see if you think they might be better than ODP's: http://ausnsw.bluefido.net/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl . Robin Patterson 15:26, 22 August 2008 (UTC) Let me know if you think I'm pestering you. But after two weeks I begin to wonder whether I've missed something. Any preliminary thoughts on the above GenWeb matter? (There are lots of Yewenyi's pages awaiting links to our place pages, and I would like to get at least NSW divided up in a way that several local genealogists are happy with before I contemplate a wholesale going-over to get his pages better integrated.) I'm willing to contact the GenWeb people if that would leave you free to do more creative work. Robin Patterson 14:48, 9 September 2008 (UTC) Thanks for including a reply in your email to me. I will contact the GenWeb. Robin Patterson 02:29, 11 September 2008 (UTC) Done that, got great response, drawn some preliminary conclusions, and put it all on Talk:Regions of New South Wales. Please (this week) go there and add some comments ("yes", "no", or something more detailed!) so that one of us can do the necessary rejig before we get too many pages to change. Robin Patterson 04:40, 15 September 2008 (UTC) Thank you for responding — well within the requested time period — on Talk:Regions of New South Wales. I've done some more work and reached a definite opinion and am inviting known Aussies to look at the page and am willing to do the necessary changing of page names. Robin Patterson 14:07, 20 September 2008 (UTC) Clever template(s) not clever enough Pages you were solely responsible for (according to their histories!) showed up something I had previously suspected about the order in which "people" pages were listing in categories. I am almost certain you are not the actual culprit, but I urge you to become aware of the problem: Template talk:Info categories. I'll tell a certain bot-manager about it too. Robin Patterson 04:40, 15 September 2008 (UTC) Categories for BDM and Resided in places Please ponder http://genealogy.wikia.com/index.php?title=Category:Died_in_Gloucestershire&action=history. Kind regards --Robin Patterson 02:26, 24 September 2008 (UTC) :we could have a template, like , that'd make it much easier to create them. Thurstan 03:28, 24 September 2008 (UTC) ::You have a good point there. Worth discussing on a related forum. Tentatively Forum:County-based categories. Robin Patterson 06:59, 24 September 2008 (UTC) ::Thank you again and please see Template talk:Born in US and its template. One of us can add the text and layout improvements to Template:b-uk after you and maybe others try to make further improvements. Robin Patterson 14:09, 29 September 2008 (UTC)